Supino breaks lance for media competence and castigates vanity

Pietro Supino announced a year ago at the traditional Epiphany meeting of the Swiss Media Association that 2017 would not be a "comfortable year for the media. He was to be proven right: Hardly a month went by without announcements of mergers, concentrations or job cuts.

Or, as Media Institute Director Othmar Fischlin put it in his welcoming speech: Hardly a letter of the alphabet was not affected - from AZ Medien, which is setting up a joint venture with the NZZ regional media, to L'Hebdowhich was discontinued, to SRG, which is facing the No Billag initiative.

At this year's conference on Tuesday in Zurich, Supino took up the cudgels for the media competence of media consumers. Because as a media maker, he said, you should not underestimate your audience. On the contrary, he said, people's media literacy must be "the absolute media policy priority.

Schools and journalists

In a free and enlightened society, people should determine the media on offer - through their conscious choices and their demand in the form of their media use. That is "better than having higher-level authorities decide on the right media offerings," Supino said, without naming any actors.

However, this presupposes that people have a basic knowledge of how media work. Only then could they recognize quality and make conscious and free decisions.

By media literacy, Tamedia Board Chairman Supino does not mean young people's use of new media, but an understanding of the interactions between the political system and the media system. Awakening this interest, he says, is the task of the media themselves and of schools.

In addition, readers need to understand what different sources and media offerings exist, how they are created and what quality criteria can be used to judge them. Here, too, Supino sees schools, among others, as having a duty - in his view, children could benefit from lessons with journalists.

Sinecures and vanities

The president of the publishers criticized media policy. In the discourse, almost only higher interests such as the functioning of democracy and the cohesion of the country are cited as the main motivations of the actors, he said. That does not seem "normal or honest" to him.

After all, media policy and the media business are also largely about influence and sovereignty of interpretation - "or in other words, about political power, positions and sinecures, financial interests and vanity. For Supino, it would be "a gain if the discourse were conducted more transparently and with more content" - and that, in turn, requires observers and media consumers with media competence. (SDA)